The present disclosure relates to fluid management systems. In particular, it relates to fluid management systems for medical appliances, such as a surgical instrument.
Certain surgical appliances use a supply of fluid to irrigate a treatment site on a patient and/or to cool the surgical appliance. Some non-limiting examples of these types of surgical appliances include micro-debriders, otologic drills, suction-irrigator instruments and the like. One common method of providing consistent fluid delivery to a surgical appliance includes pumping fluid from a fluid source, such as a bag, through medical tubing via a positive displacement pump, such as a peristaltic pump. Peristaltic pumps are desirable for many reasons, such as their ability to maintain sterility of the fluid and cleanliness of the pump because the fluid flows through the medical tubing and does not come into contact with components of the pump. In use, tubing is placed within the peristaltic pump to allow its rollers to cyclically engage the tubing to provide the desired pumping action.
Another more traditional method of controlling the flow rate through the irrigation pathway includes a gravity-feed arrangement and the use of the ubiquitous, finger-operated, roller-pinch valve. By causing varying degrees of a pinching action on the tubing, this roller valve effectively controls the fluid flow rate. While simple to implement, this method suffers from a lack of consistency and a lack of predictability of the flow rate. In particular, a surgeon can waste much valuable time during surgery adjusting (or directing a nurses/technician to adjust) the flow rate via the roller valve to achieve a desired flow rate among different instruments within a single surgery. Moreover, from one surgery to another, the surgeon (or assisting nurse/technician) cannot readily predict which position of the roller valve will achieve the desired flow rate. Besides the time-consuming nature of this adjustment method, this variability in controlling the flow rate can be distracting for the surgeon or nurse/technician, which is typically monitoring a host of other instruments and physiologic parameters of the patient.
Accordingly, conventional fluid delivery systems can hamper surgical procedures by failing to provide consistent and predictable control of a fluid flow rate from surgery-to-surgery or from instrument-to-instrument within a single surgery.